Template talk:Person
Example of nesting Person templates to indicate alternates }} :My view on my suggestion has evolved. That is to say, I think I was utterly wrong. See suggestion on alts below. [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 04:51, 21 November 2007 (UTC) Good progress The template is looking good. The instructions look fairly clear to me. I hope avid genealogists don't get put off by the complexity. If any of them do and tell us, I'm sure we can collectively help them through any difficulties. Robin Patterson 03:03, 21 October 2007 (UTC) Standard linkages Surname and date categories may perhaps be inserted with the occasional bot run? What about links to places? Should we just encourage people to make placenames into links if the wiki has a page for the place or the contributor plans to create such a page? Robin Patterson 03:03, 21 October 2007 (UTC) :I think so. Bots aren't a panacea, but I think AMK has struck the right balance, and much information can be structured from the slots that AMK has defined. :Sure, A more stringent template could be designed, and would do stuff like require dates to declare month separate from day and year, marriage field have place separate from date, surname to be explicity declared etc. But at some point you raise the barrier to entry too high, and potential contributors throw up their hands and leave. We have already seen remarks such as that left by one user who noted on the "person starting page" discussion, that it was just too complicated to get a page created. :I think the goal should be: Let's have as simple a person template as possible that still can deliver a wikipedia like feel of a high quality article. A subsequent bot run can attempt to extract and encode properly cat'd dates and places plus enhance the article with family tree and all that good stuff. If the bot messes up too much because users are encoding data in extremely ambiguous ways, then we can revisit it, but it seems to me that even with the marriage field as loose as it is, unless the contributor gets really wacky and chatty, the bot can probably pick out which part is the date and which is the place. There may be some complicated logic in telling the bot how to pick the correct place cat, but it can be done. We should encourage people hand linking stuff but tell them to skip it if following the recomendations stands in the way of it being fun. [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 03:47, 21 October 2007 (UTC) ::I agree with most of that. Robin Patterson 05:20, 7 November 2007 (UTC) Birthplace categories Recent discussion - Forum:Births in (location)/Deaths in (Location) - continues the move towards birthplace categories. Can we get a simple template in here to help bots create those? Something like Template:Born? Robin Patterson 05:20, 7 November 2007 (UTC) :I am thinking that we can get very specific in the template with some generic place hierarchy names, but allow users to continue to use a generic field name like birth place. eg: *Birth country **Birth subdiv1 (first level subdivision of a country- oblast, state, province, prefecture) ***Birth subdiv2 (second level- country, district, Kreis etc.) ****Birth settlement (generic name for village, town, city) ****Birth city, Birth town etc allowed as substitutable names. More info on automatic recogition of these fields from existing pages here: User:PhloxBot/ Proposals#Auto recognition of Place :::How does that sound? [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 21:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC) Alternates How about if we postpend -alt# to any field(where # for numbers greater than 1)? EG "Father-alt, Father-alt2, Spouse-alt" and so on? We can certainly prepend, as suggested in the current example, but it may hinder readability. No big deal either way- I have been postpending modifiers (eg wikipedia-en) as a convention. Just a thought. [[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 04:51, 21 November 2007 (UTC) Children of second spouse Should we divide the children into boxes for each spouse? --Richard Arthur Norton I 00:07, 30 November 2007 (UTC) Findagrave What do you think of adding a space for the link to the Findagrave page for that person? --Richard Arthur Norton I 01:13, 30 November 2007 (UTC) What about a 'Known as' field? Or alternate names at least? Or is that sort of data best left in the body of Person articles? Probably all of the data in the person boxes should also appear in the biography; these boxes are just summaries, right? — Sam Wilson ( Talk • ) … 15:00, 11 February 2009 (UTC) Is it time to make this simpler? Filling this in can be almost as much work as filling an info page in, with much less value in the result. Now that the info page system (admittedly not our final solution but a major step towards it) is working so smoothly and being used by a good proportion of first-time users, I recommend that we make this "Simple page for person" simpler and quicker. People who have filled it in will then feel that less work has been wasted if they or someone else upgrades their page to the info system or the SMW "facts" system. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:15, 28 May 2009 (UTC)